TITLE: 27 Dresses
STARRING: Katherine Heigl, James Marsden
DIRECTED BY: Anne Fletcher
WRITTEN BY: Aline Brosh McKenna
RATING: 2.2
Do not make the same mistake I did and flip through channels and leave this stupid movie on. The one and only redeeming factor here is that Katherine Heigl is a gorgeous bombshell of an actress and watching her in pretty much anything will yield some enjoyment. In it, she’s a compulsive wedding attender who’s too repressed to reveal her feelings to the man she’s madly in love with. Blah blah blah he ends up falling for her sister, yadda yadda yadda some handsome writer wants to write an article about her.
You and I both know we’re not watching this movie to get surprised by the plot, we watch shit like this for the same reason we have sex in the missionary position - we like going through the motions and we usually end up satisfied. On the other side of the metaphor, formulaic romantic comedies are also like a recipe for ham and cheese sandwiches, the merit of the overall product is entirely dependent on the quality of the ingredients used.
Heigl’s definitely the kind of material lead you want for this kind of movie, but literally every single other character in the movie is so charmless that you sort of hope they die and the movie can move on without them. Her eventual romantic partner (the same guy who played Cyclops in X-Men and sucked at it too) is a poorly written, miscast goof that only exists in the mind of women in a focus group. Her kooky, slutty, alcoholic co-worker is acted, written and directed so carelessly that it almost seem like she’s good friends with a meth-addict homeless woman who nobody has figured out is high all the time.
Worst of all is the ridiculous casting in the role of Heigl’s younger sister. There seems to be an unspoken rule that the casting of a rival in a romantic comedy must now produce a scorned blonde that’s noticeably less attractive than our fair protagonist. Apparently Hollywood thinks audiences are too stupid to figure out who to root for if our protagonist is challenged by a woman of equal beauty and a few redeeming qualities.
It’s hard for me to imagine that somebody watched these dailies and said “It looks like we’ve got what we need!” It shouldn’t take a cast of 300 people to realize that you’re not using good ham, cheese or bread.
- Carlos Dominicis
TITLE: WIPEOUT HD
CONSOLE: PS3
PRICE: $19.99
DEVELOPED BY: STUDIO LIVERPOOL
RATING: 8.1
Regardless of the criteria that you want to use to judge Wipeout HD, be it among downloadable PS3 games, racing games of this generation or even just flat out good entertainment deals, it’s hard to imagine you’d have too many bad things to say about it.
As a requisite, Wipeout is certainly faster and more fun than it’s predecessors - but thankfully, this time its also significantly easier to play. The game comes with a standard “Pilot Assist” mode turned on, that works similar to bowling with the bumper guards on, steering you away from the edges of the track before you can hit them. The less you have to think about stuff like this, the more you can focus on the incredibly speedy races with little room for error.
Your $20 extends far beyond a solid racer though, as the game comes with an excellent online component that breeds nail-biting and surprisingly international (I played with three french dudes and a swede for hours) duels. Combine this with some excellent additional modes like Zone racing (where you race around in circles going as fast you can until you damage your car too much) and it’s unmissable.
- Carlos Dominicis
TITLE: HEROES - SEASON THREE
NETWORK: NBC, Monday nights at 9pm.
FEATURING: Hayden Panettiere, Milo Ventimiglia, Masi Oka
RATING: 3.0
O’ Heroes, what a tragic fate for you to end up as such a senseless and stupid series. Attempting to recover itself from the fan-alienating, writers strike hindered Season Two that featured most beloved characters doing something boring or just very different from the characters we liked so much in season one, Season 3 has actually dug itself further in the hole.
Trying to remove the stink of Season 2 has lead to character sudden death, serious and intelligence insulting continuity gaps and personality changes so drastic that you’d think these people belonged on mood-stabilizing medication and not saving the world. Don’t believe me? Beloved character Niki Sanders, who had died in the season finale of season 2 - returns this season as another character altogether, played by the same actress with different superpowers and a different reason to be involved in the story. What explanation do we get? They were twins! They just had no idea.
How stupid do these people think we are? Heroes has jumped the shark, abandon ship. This show has no idea why it was good in the first place.
TITLE: SCOTT PILGRIM’S PRECIOUS LITTLE LIFE
AUTHOR: Brian Lee O’ Malley
PUBLISHED BY: Oni Press
RATING: 9.2
Scott Pilgrim is like nothing you’ve ever read before. It’s a short graphic novel about a 23 year-old Canadian slacker who plays in an indie rock band. It’s a manga, or at least heavily influenced by the genre, it’s about love, it’s about growing up in the 2000s, but most of all… it’s a pulp video game. Scott lives in a world where video game standbys like grandiose, collateral-damage heavy fights with air-juggles and magic projectiles are the norm.
Being the first of a proposed six books (five have already been released) Scott Pilgrim’s similarities with J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series are much more than superficial. O’ Malley understands that regardless of how fantastical and unbelieveable your plot actually is, the needs, wants and motivations of your characters must be believable.
Scott’s world is hilariously envisioned and richly detailed in an almost Wes Anderson like fashion. More than this, Scott Pilgrim captures a truth about this generation like almost nothing else, O’Malley deserves as much credit for his keen sense of social observation as he does for his idiosyncratic and original artwork.
TITLE: NICK AND NORAH’S INFINITE PLAYLIST
FEATURING: Michael Cera, Kat Dennings.
DIRECTED BY: Peter Sollett
WRITTEN BY: Lorene Scafaria
RATING: 6.6
Don’t let the rating fool you, this movie is charming, occasionally funny and pretty effectively heartwarming. The titular characters are two heartbroken hipster teens in New York City, courting each other over the course of a long, tumultuous evening. It bares a nice passing resemblance to “one day of adventure in a city” classics like “Before Sunrise” or “After Hours” and uses its constrained scope and scale to make us truly care for the outcome of its characters and their evening.
But alas, the movie succeeds despite itself. Nick and Norah’s friends are one-dimensional idiots who read like what a movie executive thinks teenagers are like. Attempts to be authentic to what music and places hipster kids like felt forced and fell flat. The story’s setting is ultimately an afterthought and only hinders the things about the movie that do work, namely Nick and Norah talking about pretty much anything.
ARTIST: FLYING LOTUS
ALBUM: Los Angeles
LABEL: Warp Records
RATING: 8.5
Cranking up album opener “Brain Feeder”- you wouldn’t be wrong to expect Flying Lotus to sound like the bands that made Warp Records famous, Boards of Canada and Aphex Twin. But Flying Lotus is not IDM, it’s hip-hop beats dressed like IDM, a spiritual successor to the work of the late J. Dilla and the earlier albums of Prefuse 75. His aesthetic is static-filled and any sample is buried under layers of sound competing for your attention. This is hip hop because you nod your head to it, standouts like “Camel” and “Riot” clamor to be played loudly out of a car window on a slow drive to anywhere.
